LAND GRABBING: Squatters protest against land grabbing in Lamu Image: CHETI PRAXIDES

The land question in Kenya is an extremely vexed matter. No government has dealt with it. What has been happening is a president under some pressure or in need of a "weapon" to fight perceived or real enemies using land grabbing as an easily available tool.

Despite the goodwill former president Mwai Kibaki generated with the Ndungu Land Commission, the report which contains the names of the who is who owning tracks of grabbed land in Kenya never saw the light of day, despite taxpayers' cash being spent on the exercise.

Like the Building Bridges Initiative — which has nothing new but a mere platform for political machinations — the land question is resurfacing but with no reference to the well-documented historical land grabbing cases.

This is done conveniently to hoodwink the gullible masses and project certain earmarked individuals as land grabbers. President Uhuru Kenyatta's belated attempt is poised to meet the same fate as his predecessors'.

To the past regimes, land was the readily available, highly priced commodity to be dished out to the cronies as well as used as a bait to woo opponents. The distributors took as much!

Nobody will conclusively solve it without opening the past, which like Jesus' story of the man with a spake and another with a log in their eyes, behooves the authority to first do an introspection to gain legitimacy in the whole issue to avoid backlash.

Otherwise, any knee-jack approach will merely be a poor and desperate attempt at political blackmail.